Bryn Mawr Classical Review 98.4.10

Reviewed by R.T. Scott, Bryn Mawr College.

As Linderski describes in his preface, this volume of papers dedicated
to the memory of T. R. S. B. is the result of a colloquium held at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in November, 1994. Of the original
papers given there four appear here, to which others have been added to
bring the volume to its present complement of nine.

It begins with G. W. Houston's Annals of the Broughton years, based
to a considerable degree on an unpublished memoir written by Broughton
himself late in his long and fruitful life. Although the year by year accounts
are given in imitation of MRR, the single cursus revealed is a remarkably
lively one and indeed illuminates not only the breadth of his travels
exploring
the Roman empire, how and when his idea for the study of the magistrates
came about, but also, because Broughton spent so many years at Bryn Mawr
College with Lily Ross Taylor (the College owed its good fortune to the
repulse he received from the President of Johns Hopkins after having been
nominated to succeed Tenney Frank), the reader incidentally learns a good
deal of the College's history as well. H. concludes with a personal
appreciation
of Broughton's years as teacher, colleague and friend in Chapel Hill.

From remembered conversations we pass to conversations that never took
place. Ronald Ridley did not know Broughton personally, but offers an original
contribution on Broughton and Munzer, who likewise never had an opportunity
to talk shop together: when Broughton got seriously under way with MRR
in the early forties, Munzer had already died in confinement at Theresienstadt
(1942), yet R. succeeds in creating the impression of discourse between
these two outstanding prosopographical scholars of the Roman republic,
their points of agreement and disagreement, as these emerge from their
works. Of the two Broughton appears the more conservative perhaps, Munzer
the bolder in some of his solutions, but, despite disagreements between
the two, we have Broughton's own words to show how important he considered
Die römische Adelsparteien u. Adelsfamilien to be.

Following R., T.P. Wiseman elegantly mixes prosopography, historiography
and topography in an investigation of the ancestral pedigree of the gens
Minucia, whose name and associations with the grain supply survived the
republic in the early imperial Porticus Minuciae in the campus Martius.
W. deconstructs the information contained about the family on the reverses
of denarii issued ca. 135-134 by C. Minucius Augurinus and his brother
Ti. Minucius C.f. Augrinus to arrive at a reconstruction of a possible
early family monument and its location at the base of the Aventine, but
also casts doubts on the authenticity of some early names in MRR by
highlighting
mendacious or eccentric historiographical tendencies of the mid-republican
period.

Deconstruction is also very much in evidence in Robert E. A. Palmer's
article in which he accomplishes the following. Beginning with a new
restoration
of the text of Festus 462/464 L different from Mommsen's, P. goes on to
predicate that the sacrifice to Saturn, Graeco ritu, introduced in Rome
in 217 is involved in the quarrel that may be elicited from the text of
Festus, which he argues was between the famous Pontifex Maximus L. Caecilius
Metellus and a recalcitrant young would-not-be Flamen, Q. Claudius. The
latter resisted being captured for the office in 223 on the grounds that
his clan's cult of Saturn required him to sacrifice bare headed and, ipso
facto, made it impossible for him to serve as a Flamen. He was upheld
subsequently by the people to whom he appealed the fine levied on him by
Metellus. P. adds a number of observations on patrician priests, the
persistence of
clan worship in the republic and concludes with a few suggested qualifications
(not all based on the arguments previously mentioned) to entries on priests
in MRR.

One of Broughton's last works, Candidates Defeated in Roman
Elections: Some Ancient Roman 'Also-Rans' (Philadelphia 1991),
inspired the next article by C. F. Konrad (with the collaboration of Frank
Ryan), which in exordio furnishes a supplement to that work. The author
then takes up certain considerations having to do with getting candidates'
names down in recognizable form on the ballots, a re-examination of the
lamentable electoral fortunes of M. Favonius (which also involves the
investigation
of other careers), and how it was that Favonius finally managed to secure
the plebeian aedileship in 53 or 52: when not enough hands could be
distinguished
on the aforementioned ballots, the suspect ones were thrown out and F.
emerged a winner in the recount.

All these articles exhibit a conspicuous common reliance on MRR, which
makes them especially suitable to the occasion, for, as Wiseman observes,
even when the authors disagree with T. R. S. B. over a name, an office
or a date, "we must also remember with gratitude that without the
Magistrates of the Roman Republic such enquiries could never be undertaken
at all". J. Linderski follows with a study of Pompey's father-in-law
and inveterate opponent of Julius Caesar, Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio,
whose heroic suicide in the African War in 46 (in the opinion of some people
at least) made him the equal of his distinguished ancestors. The point
of departure of L.'s study is a carved gem smaller than Wiseman's denarii
which he impishly notes "appears to have escaped the attention of
students of Roman prosopography". The reader familiar with L's meticulous
scholarship may be assured that nothing having to do with Q/Scipio/Imp,
his antecedents and his career (including his coinage) has escaped him.
He has contributed a model RE entry and a wealth of observations on Roman
institutions to the volume.

The following article by Ernst Badian on the history of the tribunate
of the plebs is another in the series of his seminal studies of Roman
magistrates
that have appeared in recent years. While Livy predictably takes it on
the chin, this is not an isolated instance of source criticism as B.
undertakes
to come to grips with the development of what he considers (probably fairly)
an irrational institution. Much of the source material on the tribunate
is admittedly confused and confusing, but B., having demonstrated how little
reliable information there is for it down to the end of the third century,
makes the most of what is available thereafter to discuss, inter alia,
the peculiar independent status of the tribunes in the period before they
acquired the right to membership in the senate and the resulting delicate
relations that obtained between them and the senate before then (and even
thereafter).

In the final article Erich Gruen continues his examination of the various
strands in the delicate braid that sustained aristocratic ascendancy and
promoted a sort of class unity amongst the nobles in the republic for so
many years. The theme has occupied him since The Last Generation
of the Roman Republic (1974) and found its voice in Culture
and National Identity in Republican Rome (1992). In this paper
he considers the varieties of aristocratic self-representation
-- portrait
busts, statues, the triumph, the aristocratic funeral and the like, a subject
which is unfortunately ill-served by some remarkably poor black and white
photographic illustrations.

The book is otherwise well made with few misprints, for which the reader
may again be confident that some credit go to Jerzy Linderski, Broughton's
colleague and successor as Paddison Professor of Latin at Chapel Hill,
who has been responsible for the conversion of fleeting oral commemoration
to written form. And it is precisely through the written word of MRR that
T. R. S. B. will continue to live so long as scholars interest themselves
in the history of the Roman republic. He himself, of course, in his cheerful
unassuming way, would have made no such extravagant claims: at littera
scripta manet.